Anguilla from the Archives, 1650-1776: Introduction

I am not a historian.  I am by profession a barrister and solicitor of the Eastern Caribbean Supreme Court in private practice, first in St Kitts from 1971 and then in Anguilla from 1981.  I was born in St Kitts in 1946, the son of Arthur Donaldson Mitchell born in St Vincent of Grenadian parents and Murielle, nee Owen, of Molyneux, St Kitts, the daughter of the late Albert Elliot Owen of North Hill, Anguilla, and his wife Elise, nee Uddenberg, of St Kitts.  I received my secondary schooling at the Roman Catholic Benedictine boarding school of Mount St. Benedict in Trinidad.  In 1964 I went to London where I completed my secondary schooling and later went on to study law at the Inns of Court School of Law as a member of the Honourable Society of the Inner Temple.  I returned to the West Indies in 1971 to do my pupillage in St Kitts with my uncle, Frank Henville OBE, QC.  I first hung out my shingle in Basseterre in early 1972 and began my practice of law as barrister and solicitor of the West Indies Associated States Supreme Court.

In 1976, at the invitation of the Government of Anguilla, I gave up my private practice in St Kitts and came to Anguilla with my wife Margaret on a four-year contract as Magistrate of Anguilla and Registrar of the Supreme Court.  As the only lawyer, other than the Attorney General, working for the Government, my duties took an interesting number of turns.  The Magistrate's Court, it is true, seldom took more than a half day each week.  The Judge, for whom the Magistrate clerked as Registrar, came on circuit twice a year for no more than four weeks at a time.  Besides being the Magistrate and Registrar of the Supreme Court, other duties included being the Coroner; Registrar General of Births Deaths and Marriages; Registrar of Companies, Deeds,  Insurance, Trade Marks, Patents, Co-operative Societies, Credit Unions, Friendly Societies, Newspapers, Trades Unions; Secretary to the Medical Board; and Archivist.

During 1977 and 1978 our office was called on to assist the Attorney General with the revision of the Laws of Anguilla inherited from the previous relationship with the Associated State of St Kitts, Nevis and Anguilla, from which Anguilla successfully unilaterally seceded by force of arms in 1967.  With the help of the Registry staff of Mary Richardson and Marjorie Connor, we also set up the first Registers of Companies and Insurances and Trade Marks, and sorted out the post-Revolutionary registry files from the cardboard boxes and shelves where they lay in untidy heaps.  Until 1977, for example, companies were registered by placing the documents in a box under a table.  With Anguilla beginning to develop as a tax haven, several hundred companies needed to be sorted out, numbered, registered and filed away in suitable metal filing cabinets, which we acquired for the purpose.

During this work in the Registry, I came across a bundle, perhaps six inches thick, wrapped in brown paper and tied with string and lying in the back of the Registry vault.  When I opened it I saw that it was made up of a large number of very old, frayed and disintegrating pages.  As I turned the first page over, I felt how brittle and fragile it was.  A piece of it fell off.  I read the page with difficulty.  The spelling and punctuation were seventeenth century.  Parts of the top of the page and bits of the right-hand margin were missing.  It was a copy of a 1673 patent from deputy governor Abraham Howell to Ensign Thomas Romney of a piece of land in Blowing Point.  I was interested and determined to read every page in the bundle.  I was certain this was an archival treasure undiscovered for a hundred years.  I did not yet know that the Baker Report of 1965 listed this bundle as "Court Records, Kings Bench and Common Pleas, Vice-Admiralty, etc, Council Minutes, Deeds, etc, c.1740-80 (1 bundle) (fragmented)," nor that Miss Kathleen Manchester and Dr SB Jones relied on it for their historical works on Anguilla.

At that time, I was ignorant of the techniques for preservation of archives.  I was aware from touching the first page that the very act of turning the page to read the other side would likely result in damage to the sheet of paper.  There were no micro-film facilities on the island.  I needed to do something to preserve the contents of the bundle, while at the same time satisfying my need to read the pages.  The solution I settled on was to obtain from Accountant-General Ralph Hodge at the Treasury four large hard-cover notebooks.  Onto the first page of the first volume I wrote out in long hand exactly what I read on the first page of the bundle.  I carefully turned the fragile page over, and on the next page of the notebook I wrote what I saw on the reverse.  I continued in this way for some 927 pages.  I copied the spelling and punctuation as accurately as I could.  Where words were missing, I marked a space between square brackets thus: [ . . . ].  Where the missing words seemed obvious, I wrote them in between the same square brackets so that it would be clear that I was supplying the missing words.  This exercise took concentration and patience and nearly a year of time, but eventually it was all done.

To my disappointment, there was not a single document in the bundle dating back to an earlier period of the island's history than that first one that started me off.  I placed the bundle of old pages back in its original brown paper wrapping and tied it firmly with string between two hard board covers and marked it "Fragile.  Not to be opened" and placed again at the back of the vault.  This work is mainly the product of the notes I made in those four ledgers that Ralph Hodge gave me.

The oldest of the deeds and patents for land I found in the bundle are not themselves the originals.  They are copies, or perhaps copies of copies, made by the Clerks to the Council during the period 1750 to 1780, when litigants submitted their deeds in evidence during disputes being heard before the island Council.  The copies were made as part of the taking of evidence during these trials of land and boundary disputes.  Errors may have crept in during these repeated copyings over such a long period.  However, that bundle, and the copy of it I made in the four note books, makes up the only archival material that we know of located in Anguilla shedding light on the earliest period of Anguilla's history.

In subsequent years I collected additional material when I visited the Public Records Office at Kew Gardens in London.  There I examined the Colonial Office records and took many copies.  The Colonial Office documents provided additional material for the text and helped me to understand the background against which the Anguilla archives must be read to be properly understood.  I was also helped by the many old volumes on the Caribbean that I read at the magnificent library at the Royal Commonwealth Society in Northumberland Avenue, where I stayed when I visited London.  Gina Douglas at the Linnean Society produced copies of geological, zoological and botanical works on the island, some written over a hundred years ago.

Nat Hodge at Radio Anguilla is responsible for this work being started back in 1978.  He was frequently at the Court House seeking news items for the government radio station and his then recently started Government Information Service (GIS) Bulletin.  He sometimes met me working at transcribing the fading and tattered sheets of the archives.  He sometimes helped as I tried to put together the jig-saw bits of disintegrating pages.  It was at his request that the following chapters were first written, and published chapter by chapter in the GIS.  It was this form of publication that determined the original chapter lengths and the general format of the text.  For this new publication, I have corrected several errors that have come to my attention since then and added further material I later discovered.

Of the hundreds of decisions of the Council that have survived, only samples are reproduced, to give the flavour of the time.  I have tried to limit the documents quoted to those that give an insight of this earliest period, 1650 the year of the island's first colonial settlement to 1776 the year of the Declaration of American Independence.  A more comprehensive history, including the modern period, must wait for a professional historian.

These chapters were first written on Government time.  For that reason, I have transferred the copyright to the Anguilla Archaeological and Historical Society in the hope that it will one day find a publisher and sell many copies to help raise the funds that the Society will need to establish the Museum that will serve to preserve the archives which started it all off.

Most of the illustrations I have selected for the work I have taken off the internet, and I believe they are all out of copyright.  I must thank Penny Slinger, premier artist of the Amerindians of Anguilla, for giving permission for her paintings to be used to illustrate the Chapter dealing with them.  I also thank the British National Archives for permission to use extracts of the documents relating to Anguilla as illustrations.  If there is any other illustration that I should acknowledge or seek permission to use, I shall be happy to do so.

Don Mitchell

Chambers

Anguilla

Email:  idmitch@anguillanet.com

1978 1st edition [published by the GIS of Anguilla]

Revised 1990

Revised 6 July 2017

Revised August 2019 6th edition [published on my blog only]

Next: Chapter 1: The Geology and Botany of Anguilla 

1. The Geology and Botany

Anguilla is the most northerly of the Leeward Islands in the West Indies.  It lies one hundred and fifty miles east of Puerto Rico and eleven miles north of the Dutch/French island of St Maarten/St Martin.  The island is narrow and low-lying.  It is some fifteen miles long and two to three miles wide (see illus 1).  The total area is thirty-six square miles.  There are no mountains, rivers or forests.

It is an arid island, with little agricultural potential.  The highest point at Crocus Hill is just over two hundred feet above sea level.  The island runs from east to west.  Its surface is tilted towards the south, so that most of the island slopes in that direction.  At the foot of the slopes on the south, the limestone surface passes gently below sea level.  At the higher end of the slope on the north, there are cliffs broken by the occasional beach.

1. Map of Anguilla

The greater part of the surface of the island has no topsoil.  It consists of fissured slabs of limestone.  A low, tough scrub covers most of it.  What little weathered limestone soil exists is found in the hollows and valleys called ‘bottoms’ that dot the island.[1]  This soil is frequently coloured a bright red, like clay, and can be quite fertile.  The soil is not clay, but weathered limestone coloured by the insoluble salts left behind when rainfall dissolved the white limestone.

The main crops for many years in the past were pigeon peas, corn or maize, and sweet potatoes.  Pigeon peas were grown in the fissures in the solid limestone from which the scrub was previously cut down and burned.  The pigeon pea shrub is nominally a biannual growing to a height of ten feet or more.  Those of Anguilla bear fruit, but they seldom grow higher than waist level unless planted in good, deep soil.  During periods of low rainfall, they almost never survive the first year’s dry season to produce a second crop.

Geologically, Anguilla consists of a cap of upwards of two hundred feet of sedimentary limestone lying on an igneous base.  In only two places, at Crocus Bay and Road Bay, is the volcanic basement of the island exposed to view.  This volcanic basement is best visible at the northern end of the beach at Road Bay.  There, a large dark boulder, black, brown or purple in colour, traversed by white veins of calcite, can be seen protruding from the cliff at sea level.  It rises to a height of some 20 feet above the sea and is easy to find.  Above it is the limestone cap that covers the entire island.

The second place to see evidence of the volcanic birth of Anguilla is at Crocus Bay to the south west of the beach, or to the left as you stand on the sand facing the sea.  There is a breccia layer visible at the foot of the cliff about one hundred feet after the end of the beach.  It must be reached by clambering over the rocks and stones that take the place of the beach.  The layer of breccia is covered by several almost indistinct layers of coloured clays.  The breccia was laid down as volcanic ash from nearby eruptions during a geologically violent time.  The clays were deposited in shallow water as the volcanic ash and rock were eroded by ancient rivers and flowed down to the sea as silt.

Some two hundred million years ago, at the start of the Jurassic period, what is now Anguilla was a small part of an old prehistoric continent known to geologists as Pangaea (see illus 2).[2]  This ancient land mass was covered during the earlier Carboniferous period in swamps and forests, and animal life was then not yet significant.[3]  During the Jurassic period, Pangaea began to break up.  Parts of this pre-historic continent sank below the sea.  Other parts began to draw away from one another to become the present-day continents, separated by the Atlantic and other Oceans.  Europe and Africa lie to one side of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, and North and South America lie to the other.  Running the length of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, small amounts of magma ooze out of the earth onto the sea bottom.  As the magma hardens it pushes Africa apart from South America at the rate of about 2.5 cm per year.  The cooled magma to the west of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge forms the South American tectonic plate which as it advances westward pushes up against the lighter Caribbean plate causing volcanic activity and earthquakes from time to time.  Anguilla and the other lesser Antilles were born on the lip of the Caribbean plate that rests uneasily on the heavier Atlantic plate that forms the ocean bottom to the east of the archipelago.

2. Pangaea 400 million years ago

Kenneth Earle writing long before plate tectonics was understood described the geology of Anguilla as follows,[4]

Geologically, the island of Anguilla forms one of the sedimentary group of islands constituting the eastern and south-eastern half of the Lesser Antillean chain . . . At only one spot on the island have I found this igneous basement exposed in the sea cliff, viz, immediately north of Road Village, where it rises in a short distance from sea level to about 25 feet and then suddenly drops again to sea level and disappears.  This rock is dark, black, brown or purple in colour and is traversed by veins of calcite.

The rocks are immediately overlain by white or cream-coloured marly limestone with fossils . . .

In Crocus Bay a rather different state of affairs is seen.  There is no true igneous basement, but at the base of the limestone series at Pelican Point is seen a series of clays, grits, volcanic breccias, etc . . . At the western side of Crocus Bay there are also blue, white, red and yellow clays at the base of the cliff - the blue clays crop out in the beach - but no volcanic grits.  It is associated with these blue clays that the lignite and "amber" occur . . .

Limestone of Upper Oligocene age forms the whole of the surface rock of Anguilla . . .

The occurrence of lignite or brown coal on the shores of Crocus Bay has been known for a long time.  This is to be picked up from the sea itself at certain times of the year (April - September), and some 50 lbs was collected in November 1921 from the surf . . . It is a soft, black, woody coal, showing distinct stratification with traces of pyritous material and plant remains on a bedding plane.  It has a distinctly brown appearance when cut with a knife . . . At certain times of the year the sea is said to sweep the sand away and expose a clear bed of lignite, but no one seems to have ever been on the spot at the time to make critical investigations of its dip, thickness, etc.  In my presence, a man went three or four paces into the sea at two distinct points, and, after removing boulders and sand from the sea floor, brought up fragments of the material, and I have seen lumps as big as a man's head collected on a previous occasion.  The only record of the lignite in writing is that in 1871 indications of coal were found in a blue clay, 30 feet down, at Crocus Bay, while "much coal" was still being obtained in 1872 from the opening made.  It was also reported to occur at Chalvilles, in the centre of the island.

Acting on these data, I had two excavations made in the beach just above water mark exactly at the spots where I saw the other pieces taken from the sea.  The first excavation - made in a blue clay, cropping out in the beach - had to be abandoned owing to the influx of the sea.  The second was carried down to a depth of eight and nine feet (beach sloping).  Shortly below beach level, clay was encountered, in which was found a thin string, nowhere more than an inch thick, of the lignite.  Associated with it were two or three nodules, the interior of which showed a transparent honey-coloured fossil resin allied to amber, which had also been reported by previous observers.  Further excavation only revealed clay, black, white, yellow and deep red in colour, but no coal.

This layer of lignite dates to the Carboniferous Era, when coal and oil originate, not only does Anguilla have no coal, but there is no oil either.  The crude oil and natural gas that other West Indian islands find around their shores, date back to this period.  Nor would there be gold or silver in the rocks of Anguilla, as these valuable minerals were deposited billions of years ago in the ancient plates that form the continental land masses.  Anguilla and other coral islands are much too young for this.

During long periods of time, as the South American plate collided with the Caribbean plate causing it sometimes to rise and sometimes to fall Anguilla was deep under water.[5]  It was then that Anguilla’s limestone cap was laid down.  Thomas Wayland Vaughan described the limestone thus,[6]

This formation is uppermost Oligocene, if the Aquitanian of Europe is correctly referred to the Oligocene.  In the opinion of some palaeontologists it would be classified as earliest Miocene.  It is paleontologically characterised by certain foraminifera, described by JA Cushman in a report not yet published, by numerous species of corals, among which are the general Stylophora, Stylocaenia, Antillia, Orbicella, Siderastrea and Goniopora, by echoids described by Guppy or by Cotteau; among which are Echinolampas Semiorbis Guppy, E. Lycopersicus Cotteau and Agasizzia Clevei Cotteau; and by a number of species of mollusca, described in a manuscript by CW Cooke.  The mollusca include Amusium Lyonii Gabb and Orthaulax Pugnax (Heilprin).  I obtained no specimens of Lepidocyclina in Anguilla.  The type exposure is along the south-east and south shore of Crocus Bay.  The material consists of calcareous clay, argillaceous limestone and more or less pure limestone.  The formation unconformably overlies basic igneous rock.

3. Subdivisions of the Paleogene period according to the IUGS, as of July 2009.

The name Oligocene (see illus 3) comes from the Greek ὀλίγος (oligos, few) and καινός (kainos, new).  This refers to the sparsity of mammalian faunas found in this geologic epoch after a burst of evolution during the Eocene.  The Oligocene epoch started about 33.9 million years ago and lasted for some 10 million years, ending about 23 million years ago.  Translated into ordinary English Dr Vaughan’s quotation above means, therefore, that Anguilla’s 200 foot limestone cap, which lies on top of the igneous rock and breccia that make up the basement of the island, was laid down between 30 and 20 million years ago, with the youngest fossil shells and corals lying at the surface and the oldest at the bottom of the cap.

Limestone consists of the remains of ancient life forms.  Vast numbers of sea creatures died in the sea over eons of time.  Their bones fell to the floor of the sea, joining conchs, corals and sea urchins.  Gradually, layers of these remains were built up.  The animal remains were changed by time and the pressure of the sea and their own accumulated weight into limestone.[7]

When Anguilla surfaced for the last time, during more recent geological times, it was capped with this layer of limestone.[8]  To this day, one can walk about the island picking up the fossil shells, corals and sea urchins of this era.  They are loosely embedded in the limestone that now forms the surface of the island and wash out in large numbers ready for collection.

Famous among the extinct mammals of Anguilla is Amblyrhiza inundata (see illus 4).  This great rat was first described in 1868 by Professor Edward Drinker Cope.[9]  Fragments of fossil bone were dug up in a phosphate mine on Anguilla.  A shipment of it was sent to Professor Cope in the United States of America for analysis.  He identified the bones he found in it as coming from this huge prehistoric rodent.

4. Amblyrhiza inundata (reconstruction)

The fossils were shipped to him accompanied by an Amerindian conch chisel.  The sciences of geology and biology were not in Professor Cope's time as advanced as they are now.  He entertained the possibility that the Amblyrhiza remains were associated with artefacts of early man.  That was an error.  It is now known that Amblyrhiza pre-dated the entry of man into Anguilla by many thousands of years.  The Amblyrhiza remains are 125,000 years old, long before humans entered the American Continent from Asia.

In a series of articles in the Anguilla Life magazine, botanist Mary Walker has described the source of Anguilla’s plants.  She says that the story begins some two million years ago in the late Pliocene time.  Then, there was extensive land uplift due to continental plate shifting.  During the Pleistocene glacial age that followed, much ocean water was tied up in the great continental ice sheets.  Sea level was lowered by some two hundred feet.  At that time, Anguilla and the Leeward Islands formed part of a larger land mass extending perhaps westward to Puerto Rico from Antigua in the east to Guadeloupe in the south.  At low elevations the land constituted a dry zone.  This was covered by a type of vegetation now called an evergreen bush land.

Some of Anguilla’s common shrubs and trees date from this period.  They are the bearded fig, fustic, cedar, masswood, cinnamint, alexanders, and loblolly.  Anguilla shares them with Puerto Rico and the Lesser Antilles.  Anguilla has about five hundred species of plants, as do the other limestone islands of the Lesser Antilles.  More than two hundred of Anguilla’s native plants are found on Puerto Rico too.

About sixty percent of Anguilla’s plants are native or wild.  That is, they become established and grow without any help from people.  Some plants arrived by water and others by air.  The Amerindians first introduced papaya, cassava, corn, cotton, tobacco, and the calabash tree whose dried fruit was used for making pots, pans and jugs.

About thirty five percent of Anguilla’s plants are exotic or introduced.  Most are cultivated as food plants or ornamentals.  About forty of them are grasses and weeds which have naturalised, that is they grow on their own.  A few, like pomegranates, tamarinds, acacias and pommesurettes have escaped from gardens and joined the wild vegetation.

In the year 1985, Dr Richard A Howard of Harvard University collected plants on Anguilla while doing field work for his six-volume Flora of the Lesser Antilles.  He made a chance stop along the road in Chalvilles.  One of the plants in the bush caught his eye.  It was not like any other plant he saw before.  From its flowers, he identified it as a member of the genus Rondeletia.  Botanists call this a ‘plastic’ genus as its plants have evolved readily into many different species in order to adapt to the different habitats that were being created in the Pliocene and Pleistocene times.  Five species are endemic to the Leeward Islands, meaning they grow only there.  The plant that Dr Howard discovered he named Rondeletia anguillensis (see illus 5).

5. Rondeletia Anguillensis (photo by the author)

It is Anguilla’s one endemic plant we know of.  It evolved to grow in the dissolved limestone pavement that covers the northern and eastern parts of the island.  It is a low shrub reaching only to the knee in the specimens I have seen.  It has the small tubular flowers typical of the Rubiaceae or coffee family to which it belongs.  Other members of the family that are abundant on Anguilla are the fustic, coughbush, black torch, wild guava, and five-finger bush.  At first glance Rondeletia looks much like a diminutive five-finger bush.  On closer examination, its flowers are smaller, and pink rather than white.  Its branches are sharp tipped like the five-finger, but the branching pattern is different.  It has tinier leaves which minimise water loss and help conserve moisture in this dry environment.  The sharp tips and leathery leaves make it not attractive to goats, which should ensure its survival.[10]

Next:  Chapter 2 - The Amerindians

  

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[1]      One of the curiosities that never ceases to amuse the discerning person is that for such a flat island there is an exceptionally large number of places named Valley and Hill.  Almost half of the place names on the island are named one or the other.

[2]      David Dineley, Earth’s Voyage Through Time (1973).

[3]      It is this primal vegetation that formed the coal that is mined today deep in the earth, and that, as Dr S B Jones recorded in his book Annals of Anguilla, is occasionally washed up on Anguilla's shores as fragments of lignite and fossil resin.

[4]      Kenneth W Earle, The Geology of Anguilla (1922) quoted by Katherine J Burdon, A Handbook of St Kitts-Nevis, Chapter 28.

[5]      The nesting Green Turtles of Ascension Island spend long periods of time feeding off the coast of Brazil.  During the Carboniferous Era, they got into the habit of swimming into a small stream to a nearby island to lay their eggs.  Over the ensuing period of 300 million years, their descendants have continued to cross the same stream every 3 or 4 years to lay their eggs.  Only, now the distance from the coast of Brazil to Ascension Island is 2,500 km, and the original stream has become the Atlantic Ocean.  It takes the turtles 5 to 6 weeks to make the trip, but turtles notoriously return to the beach where they were born to lay their eggs.

[6]      Thomas Wayland Vaughan, Correlation of the Tertiary Geological Formations of the South-Eastern United States, Central America and the West Indies in the Journal of the Washington Academy of Sciences, Vol VIII, No 9, May 4th 1918, cited by Katherine J Burdon.

[7]      Helmut Blume, The Caribbean Islands (1974).

[8]      JS Beard, Natural Vegetation of the Windward and Leeward Islands (1949), p.18: “The rock sequence in Anguilla indicates submergence from Eocene to Miocene, emergence in the Pliocene, a slight depression during the Pleistocene, and subsequent reemergence which still continues.”

[9]      Professor Cope's report may be accessed online: https://books.google.com.ai/books?id=nJA4rYDQT-4C&pg=PA183&lpg=PA183&dq=&hl=en#v=onepage&q&f=false

[10]     Articles by Mary M Walker “The Vegetation of Anguilla” in Anguilla Life magazine.

2. The Amerindians

The first Europeans settlers and their African captives arrived in Anguilla in 1650.  There is no mention in the early accounts of any Amerindians living in the island.  There is plenty of evidence of their occupation in earlier times.  Fragments of their pottery are found at sites around the island.  Middens, ancient rubbish heaps of broken conch shells and pottery; carvings; and other discarded objects are occasionally revealed on or near the beaches (see illus 1).

1. Sandy Ground shell frog (Anguilla stamp)

Professionally conducted archaeological digs now take place (see illus 2).

2. Amerindian pottery bowl found at Sandy Ground

Archaeologists recognise three separate phases of Amerindian occupation of Anguilla and the other islands of the West Indies.  The pre-ceramic or archaic period lasted roughly from 1,500 BC to AD 300, when the ceramic age begins.  Pre-ceramic simply means before pottery.  The pre-ceramic age occupants of the islands were hunter-gatherers.  Those of the ceramic period, when the use of clay pots is evident, were sedentary farmers.  The ceramic age occupants are divided into two cultures.  Those of the earlier period, 300-900 AD, belong to the ‘Saladoid Culture’.  Their pottery is highly decorated compared to the simpler more utilitarian pottery of the ‘Post-Saladoid’ period, 900-1,500 AD.  At least 13 Post-Saladoid village sites belong to this period.  There were also at least 20 smaller hamlets.  Most of these sites are contemporaneous, suggesting that the late period in Anguilla was one of relatively high-density occupation.[1]  The sites of Amerindian occupation most often mentioned include Sandy Ground, Meads Bay, Rendezvous Bay, and Island Harbour.

The three oldest wells at The Valley, The Quarter and Statia Valley, date from the time of the Amerindians.[2]  There are also springs scattered throughout the island that supported human occupation.  Fountain Cavern is perhaps the most famous of these springs (see illus 3).  It was until recently used by Anguillians as an emergency source of water.  In the 1950s, the crew of a visiting British frigate helpfully installed a sheer steel ladder from the entrance at the top of the cavern to the cave floor some 25 feet below.  This allowed the people of Shoal Bay easier access to the spring.  It is now sealed off to protect the rare and valuable petroglyphs left behind by the original inhabitants.

3. Fountain Cavern petroglyphs (By Penny Slinger^®)

During much of the twentieth century electrically operated pumps brought water to the surface from The Valley and East End wells and distributed it through the government's main supply system.  The Valley well is still used to provide brackish water to the modern desalinisation plant that now supplies a portion of the island’s public potable water.

The Big Spring at Island Harbour shows signs of its importance to the Amerindians.  There are many petroglyphs carved around its rim (see illus 4).  It also never runs dry.

4. Big Spring (By Penny Slinger^®)

At Sandy Ground, the Amerindians used the spring on the hillside under North Hill.  Their artefacts are found in that area.  The Road Well is located near to it alongside the main road.

Pere Raymond Breton was a French missionary who was sent to Guadeloupe in 1635.  He spent the next twenty years travelling between that island and Dominica ministering to the Amerindians.  Much of what we know about the aboriginal inhabitants of the islands comes from his writings.  He tells us that they called the island ‘Malliouhana’.[3]  The meaning of the word is lost.  Some have written that it might mean ‘arrow’.  This must be a reference to the long, narrow shape of the island.[4]  Others suggest that it means ‘Snake Island’, after the island’s long and winding shape, but those explanations are both unlikely.[5]  Few islands in the world are named after their shape.  It is difficult to imagine that the shape of Anguilla was immediately apparent to a person paddling by it in a canoe.

The word Anguilla means eel in Latin and Italian.  The island provides an excellent habitat for the racer snake, a harmless grass snake that lives off insects, and that is found everywhere on the island.  The first Italian to step ashore would quickly have become aware of their presence and named the island accordingly.

My preferred theory about the meaning of the word Malliouhana is based on Jill Tattersall's analysis of the wordlists and dictionaries of Amerindian languages.[6]  These were put together by the early missionaries to the Amerindians.  Each vowel and consonant has a number of possible meanings or connotations.  When you apply her analysis to the consonants and vowels you find that one possible meaning of the word Malliouhana is, ‘The Ritual Strengthening Place of the Young Men of my Tribe’.  If this is correct, it might be a reference to the important ceremonial function of the Fountain Cavern at Shoal Bay.  The elaborate carvings and petroglyphs on its walls suggest this was a ritual cavern, far too elaborate to have served only the inhabitants of the island.  You may conclude that the Fountain Cavern was more probably a ceremonial site for the puberty rituals of the young men from several of the islands around.  At the most propitious time each year, the drugged young men would be landed on the beach at Shoal Bay.  The well-worn track from the beach to the cavern shows generations of bare feet wearing down the rocky surface (see illus 5 for Penny Slinger’s depiction of Shoal Bay and the cavern below).

5. Golden Age of the Arawaks (By Penny Slinger^®)

The grotesque wall carvings of the cavern, and the equally ominous totems carried by the shamans, visible in the flickering torch light, would doubtless have thoroughly terrified the young men.  Such ceremonies were intended to prepare them for the rigours of manhood that they were about to meet (see ills 6, 7, and 8 for depictions of the petroglyphs).

6. Lizard Fertility God petroglyph from Fountain Cavern (Anguilla stamp)

7. Solar Chieftain petroglyph at Fountain Cavern (Anguilla stamp)

8. Rendezvous Bay shell mask (Anguilla stamp)

According to Spanish legend, that is unquestioningly repeated to this day in all the history books and tourist literature, the Amerindians that were living in the islands of the Caribbean when the Spaniards arrived belonged to two supposedly quite different and opposed Amerindian cultures.  They called them the Caribs and the Arawaks.[7]

Archaeologists now believe that, during the period 900–1,500 AD, the Amerindians of Anguilla and the Leeward Islands were all members of one culture.  They were mainly sedentary and agricultural, with extensive trade links between the islands.  There is not one piece of archaeological evidence for the entry of the legendary warlike tribe of Caribs, killing and eating their way northwards through the islands at the time of the arrival of the Spanish.

When Christopher Columbus ‘discovered’ the northern islands of the Bahamas in 1492, he found the natives wearing ornaments of gold which they readily exchanged with the Spaniards for trifles (see illus 9).  The search for the source of this gold became one of the major causes of the destruction of the Amerindians of the West Indies.

Columbus described the Amerindians of the Bahamas as having a loving manner and gentle speech.  These Amerindians became known to history as the Arawaks.  As we know, this was not the name they called themselves.

About the year 1975, Professor Christopher Goodwin, then of Baton Rouge University, gave a lecture in Basseterre in St Kitts.  He was conducting rescue archaeology on the site of the Ponds Pasture industrial estate in St Kitts.  This area of Basseterre was long known as an Amerindian burial site.  As I recall his lecture, he gave an imaginary and amusing explanation of how Columbus came to mis-name the inhabitants of the Caribbean as ‘Arawaks’ and ‘Caribs’.

9. Track through the Caribbean of the First Voyage of Columbus in 1492.

The purpose of his anecdote was to demonstrate how incredible it is that the Amerindians that Columbus met on his first voyage could have told him what the names were of the tribes that inhabited the West Indies at the time of Columbus’ arrival.  Tongue in cheek as the tale was, it is still the only sensible explanation that I have ever come across.

Convinced the earth was a sphere, Columbus sailed west in search of India and the spices of the east.  He took the precaution of taking an interpreter, Luis de Torres, with him.  According to Professor Godwin’s amusing theory of what happened next, de Torres was fluent in Urdu and Hindi, the main languages of the Indian sub-continent.  As this was the first voyage to the West Indies, there were in Spain no Amerindian language speakers who could act as interpreters.  When his crew came upon that first pirogue being furiously paddled by a terrified old man of the coast of the Bahamas, Professor Goodwin imagines that Columbus must have said to his interpreter, “Ask the fellow in the canoe what part of India he belongs to.”  The interpreter complied.  He ran to the bow of Columbus’ carrack, the Santa Maria (see illus 10), and leaned over, calling out to the paddler in the canoe below, “Ah pucha nah, yani mani cou?”, or something to that effect, in Urdu.  The old man in the canoe below may have looked up to him, and with the Amerindian version of the famous two-finger gesture, responded, “Arawak, Arawak”, or something like that.

Not comprehending that he was being told to go back where he came from, but not wishing to seem incompetent, the interpreter hurried back to Columbus.  He explained, “Lord Admiral, I did as you instructed.  The old man says he belongs to the Arawak nation.”

10. Replica of Columbus’ Santa Maria

Columbus solemnly wrote it down in his journal which was later carried to all the corners of Europe.  “The first Indian I found belongs to the Arawak nation!”  This word ‘Arawak’ has remained in all the history books ever since, even though we have long known that it is utter nonsense.[8]

In recognition of the wrongful naming of the Amerindians as Caribs and Arawaks, modern archaeologists, following Irving Rouse, have taken to calling all the pre-Columbian inhabitants of the Bahamas, the Greater Antilles, and the Northern Leeward Islands ‘Tainos’.[9]  The word is thought to mean ‘good’ or ‘noble’.  There is no evidence that the people inhabiting Anguilla at the time of the arrival of Columbus called themselves by this name.  It is more likely that the people of each island called themselves by their name for the island they occupied.

The so-called ‘Arawak’ crops of the Bahamas, as of Anguilla, consisted of maize and bulbous plants such as sweet potatoes and cassava (see illus 11).  They cultivated tobacco and smoked it in pipes.  They became quite intoxicated from smoking the dried leaves by inserting a forked pipe through their nostrils.

11. Cassava

They also grew cotton, weaving it into 'hamacas' to sleep in, nets, and small aprons or loin cloths.  Some Arawaks went naked or clothed themselves with leaves.  They protected their bodies from the sun by staining their skins with the dye they called ‘roucou’.  Arawak shelters were mere huts, thatched with palm leaves.  Their chiefs or Caciques wore head-dresses of feathers, occasionally decorated with small pieces of gold and bands of coloured beads and bones.  Their religion was a form of nature-worship.  Their gods, called 'zemis', were represented in the form of heads of lizards, snakes or bats made from chalk or baked earth or carved on rocks (see illus 12 for one with character).

In addition to farming and fishing, the Amerindians of the Leeward Islands at the time of Columbus’ arrival were a sea-faring people.

12. A zemi (By Penny Slinger^®)

They built pirogues, large canoes, from the gommier and cedar trees, capable of holding up to one hundred men.  These were used for travelling among the islands.  There was an active trade in stone tools and pottery, and many of the artefacts found in Anguilla are made of stone from neighbouring islands.

According to the legends taught to our children to this day, the Caribs were supposedly far less civilized than the Arawaks.  They lived on the southern islands of the Lesser Antilles.  The Arawaks were supposedly docile farmers and fishermen who occupied the northern islands.  The Caribs were described as warlike and cannibalistic.  As for the story of cannibalism, a form of ritual cannibalism undoubtedly existed among the Amerindians of the West Indies.  This involved chopping up a dead or dying enemy and cooking and eating parts of him.  This ritual was meant to insult the dead or dying enemy.  The injuries to his muscles prevented his spirit from taking any kind of revenge once he was dead.  If the eyes, tongue or muscles from the arms and legs were cooked and chewed, the spirit of the dead man would be handicapped from ever seeing, talking and shooting again.  That was their faith.

For the religious ‘Caribs’, it was a waste to simply kill a captured enemy outright.  Ritual required that his captors torture him death.  His dying screams of pain, his last breath, would be inhaled by the victors leaning over his tortured body.  In that way, the strength of his spirit was absorbed by his capturers and fortified their spirits.  The greater the torture, and the more painful the death, the greater would be the strength of the spirit that was inhaled and absorbed.  Hence, their reputation for sitting around their tortured male victims, watching them as they died.  There was no similar advantage in torturing women or children.  There was no masculine strength to absorb from their dying spirits.  There are no accounts of women or children being tortured or eaten.  Torturing, killing and eating men was a religious practice, not a nutritional supplement.

Anthropologists call the practice of eating part of an enemy ‘exo-cannibalism’.  It is distinguished from ‘endo-cannibalism’.  The latter occurs when the fat, or some other part of the body of the deceased, is consumed by the grieving relatives.  This is believed to preserve the spiritual essence of the loved one within the tribe and family.  That is particularly important in the case of a great chief or other dignitary.  The belief is not limited to the South American Amerindians.  It is a recurring concept through human civilization.  We see traces of its survival in the Christian ritual of the Eucharist.  Thus, we celebrate Christ offering his disciples bread and water saying, “This is my body, take it and eat it in memory of me.  This is my blood, take it and drink it in memory of me”.  The sacrament of the Eucharist is a ritualized form of endo-cannibalism.  Both forms of cannibalism served religious rather than nutritional aims.

Professor Goodwin, as I recall, also amusingly explained how the ‘Caribs’ got their name.  He surmises that, shortly after Columbus and his men landed on the first Bahamas island they came to, the ladies of the village wasted no time in cavorting in the surf with his sailors and crew.  The same enterprising, Urdu-speaking interpreter was sent to have a word with the Cacique, or chief, perhaps standing with his warriors in front of his home, or ‘ajoupa’. 

Columbus’ instruction to the interpreter at this first landing was to enquire of the Cacique whether all the natives of the islands around were as friendly as his people were.  Or, were there, perhaps, some who were dangerous and to be avoided?  So, the interpreter approached the stern-looking Cacique.  He enquired in Urdu, “Ah pucha nah, mani ani cou yah nah hah?” or something to that effect.  The uncomprehending chieftain glared back at him.  Perhaps, with an imperious gesture of his out-flung right hand, which was then pointing to the south, he replied, “Carib, Carib,” or something to that effect.  He probably meant, “Leave our women alone and sail back out to sea immediately!”

Still not wishing to seem a dunderhead, the enterprising but uncomprehending interpreter hurried back to Columbus.  He delivered the solemn news, “My Lord High Admiral, I did as you instructed.  The chieftain told me that, to the south, where he pointed, there lie a people who are war-like and much to be avoided.  They call themselves Caribs.”  Columbus solemnly wrote down the information in his journal.  And so, there entered the lexicography, topography, and mythology of the world the long-lasting story of the peaceful Arawaks of the northern islands and the war-like Caribs of the southern islands of the West Indies.  All this was told to Columbus on his first voyage, when there was no Spaniard who could speak or understand the language of the natives.  This myth would haunt the Amerindians in the years to come.  As for the image of the ladies cavorting in the surf with the Spanish adventurers, little did they know that the only historically significant gift of the ‘Indians’ that they would carry back to Europe when this voyage was over was the dread spirochete later known as Syphilis.

Bishop Bartholome Las Casas was a Spanish Roman Catholic priest (1474-1566) who arrived in Hispaniola in 1502.  He was the first Catholic priest ordained in the Americas, and the first bishop of the West Indies, where he lived from 1502 to 1550.  At his urging, the Spanish King would issue his famous but short-lived edict.  This was to the effect that the ‘peaceful Arawaks’ were spared from slavery.  No such indulgence need be shown to the ‘war-like Caribs’.  Having no immunity to common European diseases, the initially enslaved Amerindians of Hispaniola and Puerto Rico soon died off.  More slaves were needed to work the Spanish mines.

Under the rules of engagement laid down by the Spanish King, the Caribs could legally be seized and condemned to slavery.  Given the exemption for enslaving Caribs, it is not surprising that the Spanish slave-hunters ‘discovered’ more and more Caribs paddling their canoes in the northern waters of the Caribbean.  The explanation was that they were fighting their way from south to north, decimating and eating the peaceful Arawaks, and threatening the Spaniards.  This false narrative served the Spaniards’ purpose of legally enslaving only Caribs and not Arawaks.  The truth is there never were either ‘Arawaks’ or ‘Caribs’ in any of the waters of the West Indies.  The myth of their existence is repeated as gospel truth in the history books taught to the school children of the West Indies to this day.

It was on the second voyage to the West Indies that Columbus first met the Amerindians he called the Caribs.  At Guadeloupe, he saw huts near the shore and landed, but he found the people run away.  In the huts, his men discovered pottery of various kinds, calabashes, hammocks, parrots and cotton, both spun and unspun.  What was more significant was the large number of human bones found lying around on the ground or in the eaves of the huts.  It even appeared that drinking vessels were made from human skulls.  This led the Spaniards to believe that they were in the islands of the warlike cannibals, the Caribs, described previously by the gentle natives of the Bahamas.

After a time, some Amerindian women and children were brought back to Columbus, and he learned that all the men were gone on a raid.  Columbus’ new interpreter, Diego Colon, an Amerindian taken back to Spain from the first voyage, explained that the women claimed they were captives from the northern islands, and that the male prisoners of those islands were slain and eaten (see illus 13).

The very word ‘cannibal’ derives from a spelling error in the name that Columbus gave the Caribs, whom he called ‘Los Carribales’.  Columbus was not very good at forming the letter ‘r’.  When he wrote it, it looked like an ‘n’.  The monks who transcribed his letter to Queen Isabella mis-read his ‘carribales’ as ‘cannibales’.  So, we get the word cannibal in English.  The Caribbean Sea may as easily be called the Cannibal Sea.

13. An early and imaginary European depiction of Carib cannibalism

What was even more astonishing to the Spaniards was Diego Colon’s claim that the Carib women spoke a completely different language from the men.  This was a result, he claimed, of the Carib custom of carrying off Arawak women for wives.  Diego Colon’s account of the Carib women's explanation for their separate speech is nonsense.  What we see here is the Amerindian religious concept of ‘taboo’ at work.  When Amerindian men were on the warpath, they would use certain expressions which only men could employ.  If the same expressions were used by women, bad luck would result.  Just as it was taboo for her to use his term for common objects or persons, so it was taboo for a man to use a woman’s word for the same objects or persons.  That does not mean that they did not understand each other perfectly well.  We find a version of this common phenomenon even among modern teenagers.  An urban male gang-member in a modern city to this day uses words special to him and his friends that no proper lady among his friends and family would dream of using.

There is another cause of sex differentiation in words and phrases amongst the Amerindians of South America even today.  This is the Amerindian kinship and gender system.  In European languages derived from Latin, objects and persons may be of the male or female gender.  So, we say, ‘le table’ and ‘la plume’ in French, the first male, and the second female.  Not so among the Amerindians.  The word in question changes according to the gender of the speaker.  Thus, the word for ‘my father’ varies according to the gender of the speaker.  A son and a daughter use different expressions in addressing the same father.  This system of gender differentiation in language is well understood.[10]  It suggests that the relationship of a boy with his father is different to the relationship of a daughter with the same father.  The son and daughter understand each other perfectly when they speak to each other about their father using the words proper to their gender.  This does not mean they speak different languages, or that the men captured the women from foreign tribes.

The misnaming by Columbus of the aboriginal natives of the West Indies received a further boost in the mid-nineteenth century.  The Prussian explorer and ethnologist Alexander von Humboldt explored the Amazon and Essequibo regions in the period 1799 to 1804.  He met many Amerindian tribes in South America.  He attempted to classify their languages.  He explored the West Indies, and even wrote a history of Cuba.[11]  He gave names to the groups of South American languages that he identified.  Some of them he arbitrarily called ‘Carib’ and others ‘Arawak.’  These names were of course not known to the original inhabitants of the islands or of the South American continent.  Nor were they an authentic, indigenous tribal classification.  Von Humboldt made the classifications up out of thin air.  In his writing, he repeated the lurid stories of cannibalism and of the report of the different languages of the men and the women.[12]  His works were popular and widely read.  After blessing with this repetition the fictitious story of the two competing tribes of the Caribs and the Arawaks, no one would doubt its accuracy until recent times.

On subsequent voyages, Columbus placed settlements in Hispaniola and later in Cuba and Puerto Rico, where mines were dug in the frantic Spanish search for gold and silver.  They enslaved the Amerindians for this purpose.  By the time that Anguilla was settled a hundred and fifty years later in 1650, the Amerindians were gone.  One reads only of diminishing numbers of so-called Caribs living in some of the mountainous volcanic islands to the south, such as Dominica and Saint Vincent.

The rapid disappearance of the Amerindians from the islands, including Anguilla, is well documented.  There are many explanations for their rapid dying off in the islands of the West Indies suggested in the textbooks.  Spanish cruelty was Protestant propaganda, and not the entire reason.  Even their great god, Jocahu, the cassava god, could not save them from extinction (see illus 14).  The Amerindians were fatally susceptible to such minor common European diseases as smallpox, measles, and even the common cold.  They possessed no immunity to these new diseases.  More of them died from these infections than from the guns and swords of the Spaniards.  The Amerindian wars with the English, French and Spanish intruders, and their enslavement in the Spanish mines, are all well documented.  New light is being thrown every day on the whole question of the identity and culture of these first aboriginal inhabitants of the islands.  New theories are developing that explain many things not previously understood about their way of life and their eventual fate.[13]

14. The Great God Jocahu, carved on a stalagmite at Fountain Cavern (Painting by Penny Slinger^®)

The legend of the Arawak women captured by the fierce Caribs and speaking a different language from the Carib men is now laughed at.  It is the same with the legend of the cannibalism of the indigenous people.  Modern knowledge has not caused these legends or myths to disappear from the history books still written and published throughout the region.  The attraction of the concepts remains.  They probably start in the usual unconscious design of a conquering nation to objectify the people they are about to destroy.  They were useful in promoting Christianisation and colonialism in the early period.  They served as justification for the European enslavement and destruction of the ‘savage Caribs’.  Now that these fictions have outlived their usefulness, it might be time to let them go.

Next:  Chapter 3 - The Carib Raid   

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[1]      Dr John Crock, The Forest North Site and Post-Saladoid Settlement in Anguilla, 16^th Int. Cong. Car. Arch, 1996.

[2]      Sir William Halcrow & Partners, Water Resources of St Kitts, Nevis and Anguilla (1964).

[3]      Pere Raymond Breton, Dictionnaire Caraibe-Francois, p.202.

[4]      Katherine J Burdon, A Handbook of St Kitts-Nevis (1920), quoting Pere Breton.

[5]      Bryan Dyde, Out of the Crowded Vagueness: A History of the Islands of St Kitts, Nevis and Anguilla (2005).

[6]      Jill Tattersall, Standardised Simplified Spelling System Applied to Interpreting the Taino and Carib Languages (International Association for Caribbean Archaeology, 9th Congress, Santo Domingo, 1981, pp 506-509).

[7]      RP Devas, The Island of Grenada, 1650-1950 (1965) p. 23: "It was the Europeans who called these people Caribs, for that is not what they called themselves, which, says Raymond Breton, was Callinago . . ."

[8]      See for example: E Daniel, West Indian Histories (1937) Vol. 1, p. 35;  John Parry and Phillip Sherlock, Short History of the West Indies (1956) p. 3;  OA Garcia, History of the West Indies (1965) p. 18; Helmut Blume, The Caribbean Islands (1974) p. 55.

[9]     Irving Rouse, The Tainos: Rise and Decline of the People who greeted Columbus (1992).

[10]     Peter Trudgil, Sociolinguistics (1974) p.85.

[11]     Alexander Von Humboldt, The Island of Cuba (1856).

[12]     Alexander Von Humboldt, Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctal Regions of America during the years 1799-1804 (7 vols, 1814-1829).

[13]     Penny Slinger’s brilliant and surrealistic paintings of the Amerindians of Anguilla can be viewed at her website: http://www.arawakart.com/